BCS==Blown Collusion system (College Football)

Cafe Society
81

No team that gets STOMPED ON in their own conference title game should be allowed in the national championship game.

      College football is screwed up.  There is no way to tweak the system in place to create something that is anything close to fair.  Create a playoff and this problem goes away.  Don't give me a load of garbage about the "tradition" of the bowl games.  There are THIRTY bowl games now.  That means the top SIXTY teams go to a bowl game.  How thrilling.  No one dreams of growing up to play in the GMAC Bowl.  90% of the bowl games are nothing more than a pointless way for mediocre teams to claim a "successful" season, successful anymore meaning that they finished above .500.  Does anyone really care if the #5 Big Ten team beats the #4 SEC team, or whatever formula they use?  I don't.  

    Keep the major Bowl games (Rose, Sugar, Cotton, Orange?), create a playoff system with them.  Forget about accomodating every mediocre team in the country so they can feel good about their 6-5 record.  If the other Bowls want to continue on their own, fine, but move toward a playoff system with the major Bowl games.

      And get rid of this stupid OT system while you're at it.
82

That is is the point everybody has been making about this whole mess. The BCS system is flawed. The top two teams in the BCS should be the top two teams in the country but it isn’t this time and the #1 team in the country got shafted.

I haven’t heard him whine once but he doesn’t really have a reason to. He gets to play in the Rose Bowl and if USC wins, they will split the national championship title. They get a chance to do that in their own backyard thanks to OU’s loss on Saturday. I’d be thrilled if I was him. He’s said that this is their national championship game and it is because they will be national champs if they win.

83

All bowls get the most attractive candidates for their game obviously, and I think the line-ups are great, witht he exception of the Miami-Florida State game in the Orange Bowl. Ohio State should be playing Miami and FSU should be going to the Fiesta Bowl, but FSU does not travel well, so there you go. I mean, if I was an FSU fan, I would not travel all the way to Arizona and pay outrageous prices to watch them play Kansas State. So, there you go.

The SEC is much tougher than the Pac-10 every year. The Big 12 is a tough one too, really everyone with the exception of Baylor is competitive there.

What bothers me really is that these players are not professionals, are not getting paid, and play a dangerous sport. Schools are now playing 12 games, and several schools will end up playing 14 games when it all ends with the bowls. Then there are 26 bowl games requiring 52 teams to play in them, so even half assed .500 teams get a 13th game. he pressure for the coaches and the top teams must be astronomical, lose one game, screw up one FG, and you are out of a BCS bid or a National Championship. Too ugly for me.

ET

84

We do? No, all we know is OU lost to K State that day. OU beat Texas and Oklahoma State, both teams that Kansas State lost to. So how can we claim that Kansas State is better than OU when they had three losses to OU’s one, and two of the teams that Kansas State lost to OU annihilated by a combined score of 117-22.

By your logic, how can we claim USC is the best team when we know Cal is a better team? I mean, they beat them, right? How can we claim LSU is the best team when we know Florida is better? They beat them right?

85

I would counter that either no team from a conference that doesn’t have a championship should be allowed to play or that the championship game should not be considered at all. It’s just a greed fest anyway.

86

I second what Murcielago said - I was getting ready to post it myself. The final record of an opponent does not always correlate with the strength of the opponent on the day that your team played them.
A win against a highly ranked team that then goes on to drop it’s next wo should be considered better than a win against a lower ranked team that improves later in the season, even if both opponents finish the season with identical records.
Injuries to key players, team morale and momentum and adjustments to offensive and defensive schemes all occur over the course of the season, and the coaches and AP polls reflect this, at least somewhat. The BCS does not, and it should.

If OU had been pummeled like they were on Saturday 3 games into the season I don’t doubt that they would have played like a different team for the next game, if not the rest of the season. Recent record indicates more than just the overall record of a team.

87

That’s why the “when” is important – a loss yesterday says a lot more about the current quality of the team than a loss early in the season. Some teams get better, some don’t. Cal got USC on a good day (for Cal) early in the season. If they played tomorrow, my money’d be on USC. K State whupped OU in every aspect of the game, just this week. If they played again tomorrow, what do you think the line would be?

88

Good point. I’m pretty sure that Washington State’s Kegel’s proformance was affected in later games by the stomping in of his shit that USC gave him. So they end up losing a bunch of games because the Trojans were able to bully him and * the Trojans end up suffering in the BCS because of it!!* I may be wrong, but I seem to recall through my alcoholic haze that we put a few other players out of games (Notre Dame and Washington) that may very well have caused those teams trouble down the road.

And I’d like to say this about Oregon State scoring 21 points on USC: Outstanding linebacker Grotegoode did not play! I suspect he was being held in reserve for the championship game. If he was in the game, things may have been different. Who knows? Certainly, he is a key player in the secondary and his absence was felt.

Screw the Sugar Bowl! I’ll be happy to claim the Championship at the Rose.

Never kiss an animal that can lick its own butt.

89

If they played again tomorrow, OU would be the favorite again. Just not by as much. In fact, if they were to play 9 more times, I’d put my money on OU every time.

And if OU were to play LSU or USC this weekend, they’d beat either one of them.

They destroyed every team they came across, from Texas to Oklahoma State to whoever, until they had a bad game against KSU. It happens. It happens in the NFL, the old trap game.

The when is not that important. It might be if there were injuries we were discussing or something, but there’s not.

90

I suppose what I’d finally conclude out of all of this is: if college is not going to have a play-off, then you better learn to enjoy and/or accept a controversy about who the national champion is.

The BCS was supposed to remedy the problem of co-champs. But, these teams were able to find a permutation of wins/losses/SOS that could possibly give us co-champs. Basically, any system you can dream up that doesn’t have a playoff has the possibility for this.

Whether the Sugar bowl was LSU/OU, LSU/USC or USC/OU you were still going to have a problem if the “out” team wins their game. There is no “right” answer for what to do with how this season ended.

Just my final thoughts.

I’m comfortable with the bowl system and the occasional co-champs, FWIW.

91

And indeed, OU is currently a 6 1/2 point favorite over LSU even though the Sugar Bowl can only be considered a home game for LSU. link There’s no way to know for sure, but I would bet (pun intended) that OU would be favored over USC as well. This article mentions that OU would have been a 10 point favorite before the debacle in KC and a 7 1/2 favorite over USC so it is not totally unreasonable to assume that OU would have been approximately a 4 point favorite even after the loss.

92

The point spread isn’t indicative of how good a team is, it’s indicative of how Vegas bookies think people will bet. Their goal is simply to set a line (and move it accordingly) so that there is roughly the same amount of money on each side, insuring that they make a profit in the end.

If the spread changes between now and Jan 4 (which it probably will), it will be to entice bettors to take the other side, not because one team is necessarily looking better than the other.

93

You are absolutely correct about bookies and the purpose of the line. But it is not unreasonable to assume that a majority of betting people believe that OU is a better team than LSU or at least will beat them in the Sugar Bowl. Otherwise, the spread would tilt to LSU’s side, which is extremely unlikely. I firmly believe (although there’s no way to prove) that if the AP writers had to pick the straight up winner of an OU/USC matchup and they had to put their own money on the game, a majority would side with OU. This leads us back to quixotic78’s proposition that the AP and Coach’s polls do nothing but measure winning streaks.

94

I know you’re just rying to make a point, but I have to disagree with this one. I worked at that game, watched most of it. If anyone got lucky, it was OSU, they were outplayed and tied it up at the end, got beat on a long touchdown with Lee Evans burning OSU’s best dback, and UW put it away on a short drive. The only reason, imho, OSU was in the game still was their linebacker literally strangled the UW quarterback early on and put him out of that game and the next. Though it was a hard place to play that night, lots of drunken fans, night game, ESPN and all.

Whatever happens in the BCS game, the pollsters should vote USC # 1, if they win their game. I would. Put whoever wins the BCS game as #2. Also, I love how ABC(?) jumped all over this, by declaring it was #1 vs #2. I guess in the BCS series, it was #1 vs #2, but not in either other poll, and not in many others minds.

95

ABC does everything possible to pimp the BCS (which they more or less designed themselves, didn’t they?), including garbage like this. They billed the Michigan/Ohio State game as 2 vs. 9, when in fact it was 4 vs. 5.

Also their studio talking heads like to gush about how great the system is.

96

I’m not upset about the outcome because I’m not a fan of any of the 3 teams, but no matter which way it was done, someone would get screwed.

Even a playoff set-up screws someone – how do you justify who has to play the #4 team and who plays the #3? Why does Michigan deserve to play for the national championship? (it’s definitely possible that they could win both games.) That leads to the argument of the #4 team in the playoff.

One thing I think should come out of this to improve the current BCS system would be to add a factor for winning your conference. That may be unfair to conferences that have title games, but those conferences could always adjust their system to be “BCS” friendly.

BTW: I don’t think USC should be too cocky about playing Michigan. It will not be an easy game. If they lose, then the BCS ends up being right.

97

Why, exactly, is having a split national championship a bad thing in the first place? Doesn’t that pretty accurately reflect the reality of the situation here–or in the alternative if there were two undefeated teams–that no one team is undisputably the best in the nation?

98

What the point of playing a whole season and then just saying, “OK, these are two good teams. Both get a ‘national title’”? You can’t both be champions, not in a team sport. This is similar to the argument that split champions are good for the game because it creates talk and buzz about college football. Thats not true. IF this were the case, then the best season EVER of Major League Baseball would be the non-world series strike shortened season. ANYONE could have been the champion. Does anyone still talk about it? No. Do you see any other major college sport deciding a national champion based on the opinion of sportswriters, coaches and computers instead of in head to head competition? Even every other Division of college football except Division I has a championship playoff system.

99

This is probably going to be long, so I apologize in advance. A playoff is a popular idea, but there are problems- you have to have a set number of teams that make the playoff every year. It has to be four, because there’s no way you can have a college football team tack 3 or more games onto the back end of their schedule- the extra bowl game is enough as it is. Were a playoff instituted this year, that would mean the two finalists would be playing in their 15th game, more than likely. So we’d have a four team playoff, and no more.

The problem is, as Bobby Roberts pointed out, not every season is conducive to a four team playoff- in fact most are not. Ostensibly, this year’s playoff would look like this: (1) Oklahoma vs. (4) Michigan, and (2)LSU vs. (3) USC. That’s based on the BCS rankings. Michigan, despite a blowout loss to Oregon, gets a shot at a national championship, while a bunch of other 2 loss teams are left out in the cold. So what you have is, despite the playoff system, a team being chosen over others based on rankings and computer numbers, and not on the field. If Michigan even wins that first playoff game, off go the alarms.

What about a year like last year, where there were two undefeated teams who were unquestionably the two teams who deserved to play for the title? Let’s say Willis McGahee’s injury had taken place in the fourth quarter of a blowout win (or close game) over USC or whoever was the #4 BCS team at bowl time. Then, if Ohio State beats Miami in 2 OT’s, there will be a whole bunch of Miami people complaining about having to play an extra game when they “earned” the right to be in the championship. They’d say “Now we’ll never know who’d win if we just played the championship game.”

Another situation- what if we had a year with a dominant, undefeated, number 1, and six teams with one loss, from five different conferences? Again, no matter what the format was, some kind of subjective ranking system would have to decide what three teams get to fight it out. In a sport with more than 100 teams competing and playing a dozen games each, there is absolutely no way to come up with a system that could pick and choose X number of teams who deserve to play for a championship. You can’t compare it to other sports- other sports have either three times as many games to play with, or a structure wherein each team plays most other teams at least once. Every year in the NCAA’s, somebody doesn’t get what they feel like they deserve, and there’s a new controversy. When there are three teams who are arguably equally worthy of championship play, the playoff talk starts. What if there are five? Unless you rewrite the rules every year depending on the manner in which the shaft du jour takes place, you’ve got to have some kind of system, and there won’t be unanimity.

HomerIU said:

I agree that a split champion is a distasteful result, but I don’t think it’s the system’s fault. I think every college sport’s national championship is at least somewhat a result of opinions. March Madness, for example- does the best team always win the tournament, or does the occasional team which gets a favorable seed, and catches fire to win six games? There are always teams who feel like they either got thrown in an unfair bracket, or teams who get left out of the tournament altogether who think they deserve it. I’d say that the fact that a #1 seed doesn’t usually win the tournament is evidence of how a playoff can guarantee that the best team will NOT win. If the AP number 1 played the AP number 2 in basketball every year, just think how different college basketball would be. More than half- way more than half- of the previous championships would be held by different teams. So with a playoff, you’re talking about really limiting the chances of the #1 team winning (obviously not as much as in basketball, but you are). Saying that a playoff would guarantee the best team being # 1 isn’t necessarily true. More fun, yeah, but not fair to the team ranked #1. At this point in college football, that #1 ranking still means something, which is why you can’t really compare from sport to sport.

100

Why not?